A history of Lowell, Massachusetts

Lowell was founded by the ‘Merrimac Manufacturing Company’ in 1822, and named after Francis C. Lowell. The village grew very rapidly from the first. In 1820 it was incorporated as a town and ten years later was chartered as a city. This book tells the story of this very important textile center from the beginning until the 1870s.

Lowell is a city in the U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Located in Middlesex County, Lowell (along with Cambridge) served as a county seat until Massachusetts disbanded county government in 1999. With an estimated population of 109,945 in 2014, it is the fourth-largest city in Massachusetts, and the second-largest in the Boston metropolitan statistical area. The city is also part of a smaller Massachusetts statistical area called Greater Lowell, as well as New England’s Merrimack Valley region.

Incorporated in 1826 to serve as a mill town, Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, a local figure in the Industrial Revolution. The city became known as the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, due to a large series of textile mills and factories. Many of the Lowell’s historic manufacturing sites were later preserved by the National Park Service to create Lowell National Historical Park. During the Cambodian genocide, the city took in an influx of refugees, leading to a Cambodia Town and America’s second-largest Cambodian-American population.

Lowell is home to two higher education schools, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Middlesex Community College.

(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

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